Assimilation of the seabird and ship drift data in the north-eastern sea of Japan into an operational ocean nowcast/forecast system

At the present time, ocean current is being operationally monitored mainly by combined use of numerical ocean nowcast/forecast models and satellite remote sensing data. Improvement in the accuracy of the ocean current nowcast/forecast requires additional measurements with higher spatial and temporal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2015-12, Vol.5 (1), p.17672-17672, Article 17672
Main Authors: Miyazawa, Yasumasa, Guo, Xinyu, Varlamov, Sergey M., Miyama, Toru, Yoda, Ken, Sato, Katsufumi, Kano, Toshiyuki, Sato, Keiji
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/158/856
639/166/988
704/106/829/2737
9/10
Animal Migration
Animals
Aquatic birds
Birds
Data assimilation
Data collection
Drift
Eddies
Environmental Monitoring
Forecasting
Humanities and Social Sciences
Japan
multidisciplinary
Ocean currents
Oceans and Seas
Remote sensing
Satellite altimetry
Science
Seawater
Ships
Water Movements
Wind
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Summary:At the present time, ocean current is being operationally monitored mainly by combined use of numerical ocean nowcast/forecast models and satellite remote sensing data. Improvement in the accuracy of the ocean current nowcast/forecast requires additional measurements with higher spatial and temporal resolution as expected from the current observation network. Here we show feasibility of assimilating high-resolution seabird and ship drift data into an operational ocean forecast system. Data assimilation of geostrophic current contained in the observed drift leads to refinement in the gyre mode events of the Tsugaru warm current in the north-eastern sea of Japan represented by the model. Fitting the observed drift to the model depends on ability of the drift representing geostrophic current compared to that representing directly wind driven components. A preferable horizontal scale of 50 km indicated for the seabird drift data assimilation implies their capability of capturing eddies with smaller horizontal scale than the minimum scale of 100 km resolved by the satellite altimetry. The present study actually demonstrates that transdisciplinary approaches combining bio-/ship- logging and numerical modeling could be effective for enhancement in monitoring the ocean current.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep17672